What to watch this long weekend in international sports
The Buzzer is off Friday and Victoria Day, so we're giving you an early look at what to watch through the long weekend in international sports. Plus, a tough night for Toronto hockey fans, a good one for the Oilers, and big game(s) coming up for Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.
A few things for Canadian fans to keep an eye on over the next few days:
Track and field: Canadians in two global meets
The road to the world championships continues Friday in Doha, which is hosting the third Diamond League meet of the season. Two Canadians are competing: sprinter Aaron Brown and pole vaulter Alysha Newman.
Brown is coming off last week's World Athletics Relays in China, where he helped the Olympic-champion Canadian men's 4x100m team take bronze and qualify for the world championships. A bad exchange between Brown, who runs the leadoff leg, and Jerome Blake hurt the Canadians in the final before Brendon Rodney and Andre De Grasse rallied them from fifth place to the podium.
Brown is in the men's 200m on Friday at 1:22 p.m. ET, featuring Olympic champion Letsile Tebogo of Botswana.
Newman makes her outdoor season debut in the women's pole vault, starting at 11:02 a.m. ET. The Olympic bronze medallist will take on reigning world champion Katie Moon of the United States, who took silver last year in Paris after winning Olympic gold in 2021.
WATCH | Alysha Newman joins CBC Sports to open up about Olympics, life lessons:
Alysha Newman opens up: Olympic bronze, life lessons, and more
4 months ago
Duration 22:23
Other international stars competing in Doha include reigning Olympic champs Hamish Kerr of New Zealand (men's high jump) and Winfred Yavi of Bahrain (women's 3,000m steeplechase) and 38-year-old Jamaican sprint icon Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce (women's 100m), who owns three Olympic golds and 10 world titles. Watch the meet live Friday from noon-2 p.m. ET on CBCSports.ca and CBC Gem. Here's the full schedule.
De Grasse and Blake are competing in the World Athletics Continental Tour's Golden Grand Prix in Tokyo, which will host the world championships in September. Blake faces former world champion Christian Coleman in the men's 100m, while Grasse runs the 200m. Watch the meet live on Saturday night starting at 11:50 p.m. ET on CBCSports.ca and CBC Gem.
For more on Canada's performance at the World Relays, read this analysis from Morgan Campbell and watch the debut episode of CBC Sports Trackside, with Brown and Rodney joining host Perdita Felicien.
Hockey: Canada levels up at the men's world championship
Let's be honest: there are too many teams in this tournament. Sixteen to be exact, which means an interminable group stage consisting of seven games for each team and tons of mismatches.
For example, Canada (featuring Sidney Crosby, Nathan MacKinnon, Marc-Andre Fleury and several other NHL standouts) blanked France (almost completely devoid of NHLers) 5-0 on Tuesday to improve to 3-0. Before that, Canada beat Slovenia 4-0 and Latvia 7-1. At our publish time, Crosby and company were up 2-1 on Austria in the second period.
Things might get a little more interesting for the Canadians this long weekend as they face Slovakia on Saturday and Finland on Monday before wrapping up their group slate Tuesday against host Sweden. Stocked with NHL players such as Filip Forsberg, Lucas Raymond and Mika Zibanejad, the Swedes are 4-0 while outscoring their opponents 17-3.
The top four teams in each group advance to the quarterfinals a week from today.
Golf: Five Canadians in the PGA Championship
The second men's major championship of the year teed off this morning at Quail Hollow in Charlotte, N.C. It includes Corey Conners (ranked 21st in the world), Nick Taylor (36th), Mackenzie Hughes (44th), Taylor Pendrith (49th) and Adam Hadwin (92nd), all hoping to become the first Canadian man to win a major since Mike Weir's Masters victory in 2003.
The co-favourites coming in were world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler of the United States and No. 2 Rory McIlroy of Northern Ireland. McIlroy completed the rare career Grand Slam with his dramatic victory at the Masters last month and has won four PGA Tour events at Quail Hollow. Scheffler, despite being the premier player on Tour over the past three years and an Olympic gold medallist in Paris last summer, is still looking for his first major title outside the friendly confines of Augusta, where he won the Masters in 2022 and '24. Here's the live leaderboard.
If you missed Tuesday's newsletter, here's our primer on the PGA Championship.
Other stuff to watch:
* Canadian Olympic swimmers Sydney Pickrem and Ingrid Wilm are competing in the Mare Nostrum Tour opener in Monaco. Pickrem finished sixth in the women's 200m individual medley last summer in Paris, while Wilm was sixth in the 100m backstroke before taking bronze in that distance at the short-course world championships in December.
* Canada's Derek Gee ranks 29th overall heading into the second week of the Giro D'Italia, one of cycling's three Grand Tours. He finished ninth overall in his Tour de France debut last year and was 22nd in first Giro in 2023.
* In basketball, Canada makes its FIBA 3x3 Women's Series season debut in Amsterdam, where 2024 Olympians Katherine Plouffe and Paige Crozon are playing with Cassandra Brown and Saicha Grant-Allen. Back in March, Plouffe, Crozon and Grant-Allen teamed with Kacie Bosch to win the FIBA 3x3 Champions Cup, beating Olympic silver medallist Spain in the final. You can watch the two-day Amsterdam tournament starting Friday on CBCSports.ca and CBC Gem. Canada plays Ireland at 12:20 p.m. ET and Puerto Rico at 2:20 p.m. ET. Here's the full schedule.
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Alec's Argos enthusiasm could wane if they have a bad season or two, or if kids at school convince him the NFL is what counts. His on-field career could come to a crashing halt anytime, too, if he decides another sport (or no sport) is for him; a flag-football craze that's swept through his friend group for reasons I don't fully understand could easily be replaced by something else. At a certain point, as he approaches teen-hood, his dad's involvement could become a bug rather than a feature. I'm also not going to pressure Alec's brother, five-year-old Felix, to follow in his football footsteps – even if there were early signs of enthusiasm at his first Argos game last fall. But living in the moment is something I'm always trying to encourage my kids to do, and it's probably time to practise what I preach. No matter how close and loving your relationship with your children, it can feel like a constant struggle to stay connected. I do my best to understand and embrace Alec's tastes in anime or Roblox video games or memes he's heard about from his friends, even as I try to police them. But particularly when it involves mediums that didn't exist when I was his age, there can be a distance. Then something comes along that fits how you vaguely pictured parenthood before the kids were born. Something more analogue, maybe, more transferable between generations, that you can nurture and share. You know it's giving you memories you'll keep the rest of your life, and your kids will too, but first you try to savour it and make it last as long as possible. So I'm signing up to coach again when flag football resumes in the fall. And I'll be buying tickets for all the Argos games we can go to this season. I'll be quietly thanking them, every time I'm in the stadium, for what they've helped us share. Alec won't be thinking about the game that way now; it's not how kids work. But one day, he just might.
